Kettlewell House

Description

Kettlewell House a charming Tudor style home in a quiet residential area near Woking town centre, in Surrey.

Kettlewell House provides accommodation for physically frail older people and those with dementia type illnesses in a recently refurbished building with attractive grounds. It is one of a number of nursing homes owned by husband and wife team, Ernie & Dr Karen Graham. There is a choice of nursing home bedrooms or Care Suites where residents receive nursing care in larger units.

Within Kettlewell House, we have adopted “relationship centred care” as our principal approach to care provision.We seek to integrate this into all aspects of our operations, with the aim of building stronger relationships between residents, staff, relatives, friends, etc.

The concept of Relationship Centred Care takes the well established concept of Person Centred Care one step further with the recognition that to enable residents to be happy and fulfilled, we need to understand theirpast and present relationships with others.It is not just their relationships with staff that are important but also their relationships with family members and other care professionals.

In short, Relationship Centred Care reflects the importance of interactions among people and recognises that these provide the foundation of any therapeutic care activity.

For residents in a social care environment, relationship centred care can be illustrated by a "relationship triangle". This illustrates "the third dimension" in which care staff and family/friends develop relationships directly with each other, in addition to their traditional relationships with residents.

In order to develop this third dimension, some of our recent initiatives are as follows:

Residents’ Life Histories

These are an excellent way to get to know the residents better.They empower residents to talk about their memories and give them a chance to contribute and feel involved.They are also beneficial to staff by helping them to understand the residents’ care needs from a much wider perspective.Where possible, the histories are compiled by friends and families and they ideally include testimonials by significant people in residents’ earlier lives.

Contact with wider family & friends

When residents move into care, it is often difficult for relationships with their wider family and friends to be maintained.In order to help them to keep in touch, our aim is to maintain contact details for all residents’ children and grand-children.These can then be used for party invitations, newsletters and updates on residents’ social programmes.We are placing particular emphasis on building relationships with residents’ grand-children (usually in their 20's/30's), as residents really value contact with them and this age group is often reluctant to visit care facilities.